Inspired by and inspiring entire movements in literature and the arts, hitchhiking is more than a quirky and nearly extinct mobility genre. This fellowship shall allow me to complement my own ethnographic research material on this form of travel by uncovering its hermeneutic significance as found in travel writing and the ‘mobilities turn’ literature. The aim is to begin collating together material for a monograph based on data from over a decade’s worth of field notes gathered from around Europe. This fellowship would allow me to refine the ideas of several papers presented recently at various conferences/seminars and to follow up on an article dealing with the uses of autostop as an ethnographic methodology. The residency will thus permit me to explore some of hitchhiking’s cultural narratives within the context of the English speaking world and put this into a comparative, cross-cultural context which considers the phenomenon as it occurs in Benelux, Germany and the Baltics.